I had another unproductive day today. It didn't mean to be unproductive, of course, but it was. I began with a song in my heart, specifically my lower left ventricle chamber being filled with the scraps of a song I had written a few days previous. I had it stuck in my head for a while, kept playing it on the piano at my house, and generally liked it.

    I was convinced to try to write it down a few days back, a difficult task for someone like me with no artistic ability and very little concept of how to read or write music. Still, the lure was that it could perhaps be turned into a contradance song, and the thought of having my little ditty (with bits of Gilbert and Sullivan, Nobuo Uematsu, and another contradance) played by the band made it worth the effort.

    Well, After meeting with a band person thisafternoon, she told me I ought to ask another band person to help me rewrite it neater, and they'd give it a shot. She said it was different than their usual music, but didn't seem to think (or at least, reveal) that this would be a problem.

    The other person was much less encouraging, which I'm guessing is because she's much more candid. After dinner, she informed me that not only did it need to be rewritten, but parts of the melody weren't right, and actually the whole melody didn't work well, and come to think of it I'm focusing too much on chord structure and not enough on melody, and actually I don't really know enough about contradance music to be writing any in the first place.

    After about 15 minutes of listening to various contradance CDs and being completely unable to tell what rules they followed that my tune didn't, I gave up and decided that writing a contradance clearly isn't in the cards for me.

    The hour was late, and I'd accomplished nothing, including music, writing, or anything else you care to name. I felt like being run over by a car, or failing that, to see a friendly face or two. I figured the latter would hurt less, so I went to see a friend of mine read a story from a balcony just because he could. A dozen or so people gathered below to listen, and I off to the side as well.

    After that, I went up to hang out with him, and we wrote the halftime show for the band's homecoming game in November. It turned out pretty funny, and even though it doesn't excuse the otherwise unproductive day, it sure made me feel a lot better about my Sunday.

    The moral here is that I should write with words because I know what I'm doing, and not pretend that I'm still a musician. Also, a friendly face generally beats getting run over by a car.